We are now going apace, aren't we. Here is Scene 3 - the first half at least - in which the reader gets to meet the Gentlemen Rankers. Did I leave it too late? The reason my scenes are cyt to about 1,200 words words is that the Richmond Writer's Circle - not unreasonably give us each a maximum of 10 minutes. I have to gabble a bit and my stammer must be a pain for all concerned. I'll say more about the Gentlemen Rankers in the next post.
Sifting slowly, seeping in – sand became encroaching dust. The giant fan pulled lazily to and fro by the punkah wallah in the courtyard outside only moved hot air from one place to another. The smells of India suffused this ramshackle army barracks. There was tension all around - sand, binding heat and writhing gods – gods of this, gods of that, gods of forever heat and dust. If that were not enough, there was a rumour that the Commander-in-Chief was around and about in the encampment. He had arrived with the dawn, before his time, and was working into the night. Grand strategies might be left in tatters, requisition lists might be once-overed with a fly-swat and roll-calls supervised with a baleful eye. The Commander in Chief wanted more, wanted different and wanted his way. He wanted it now. Somewhere, an adjutant would have been wearily putting blotting paper to his brow and flicking iced water into his reddened eyes.
All around, soldiers untrained for idleness but all too familiar with its ways were idle. The great transit camp of Deolali, one hundred odd miles North East of Bombay was at its sultry worst. Here, the sergeants’ mess, the kernel of its troubled soul, contained the usual sloth of men with sweat stained shirts and clinging draws. Among them, at the long bar, were Sergeants Ambrose Delahey and Reuben Chatham. Each contemplated in silence the glass of ale just below his lips. Beer was contemplated. Beer was drunk. The empty glasses were briefly eyed, the froth left at the bottom examined as if some future or another might reveal itself. Then, empty of prediction, they were pushed back across the bar to be refilled. Any future could wait until the dawn when the world might be ready for it. With the dawn might come some knowledge of why they had been summoned here.
Delahey and Chatham were quietly enjoying a time of nothing happening that terrified, shamed, sickened or hurt them. India sullenly weighed upon them. They didn’t care. As if by some dull magic, nothing was happening, ale was consumed and fellowship enjoyed. It was enough.
The bar steward, waited ready to grab at the empty glasses and refill them. These men were of the kind that you wanted to go away happily back their sleeping quarters, happily and, yes, as soon as fortune would allow. Affable and generous in their tipping so they might be but the always possibility of danger hung over them like the dew-dank morning before a battle.
The barman had been warned of course. These men acting like toffs, talking like toffs and wearing black frock coats, elegant and unfingered by His Majesty’s regulations, were seriously bad news. They were sergeants, right enough, sergeants of engineers, and as such fully entitled to loll against the sergeants mess bar and take a drink if that was what they wanted to do. But a proper sergeant would only shout your balls off on the parade ground. These men might fry them too and fork feed them to you through your teeth. He just wanted them gone before any trouble caught their eye. He noted their wariness – how they glanced at the big mirror behind him, always alert to everything about them in the mess.
Carrying a tray of drinks across the room Percival Noone, private of the Buffs, as he would be when the parade bugle sounded, but for now a steward in the Sergeant’s Mess, would catch any eye. Even as he tried his best do be inconspicuous, he drew attention. However he tried to position his arms and legs he was possessed of a devil may care swagger that pierced across the room and crowd. If you caught his eye just then, as Chatham did, you could see that the devil did indeed care – and was staring right back at you through godless eyes. Chatham had the instincts required for such things. Trouble was about to tug his sleeve and he knew it. He nudged Delahey, the big Ulsterman.
‘Look over there at the young steward with the tray’, he nodded.
‘Right enough’ said Delahey, ‘I saw already. He don’t fit, does he?
‘Time for us to go’ said Chatham. ‘This is our time to start at shadows, my friend. Whatever happens here is nothing of our business. I suspect we’ll soon have more important things troubling us. And look there, under the Queen’s portrait, man’, he muttered.
‘The Yankee sergeant?’
‘Yes,’ said Chatham. ‘A Yankee soldier of the King, now that’s a turn up isn’t it? Didn’t we see him though not so long ago? A different uniform he was wearing then. Peking wasn’t it? - in and around the legations. Strange it is. Somebody should be keeping an eye out for that one – not us though.’
‘And neither is the boy any of our business?’ asked Delahey.
Just then, from behind him a large hand pushed Noone’s shoulder jerking him forward.
‘Come on,’ said Chatham. ‘Let’s go’.
‘No’ said Delahey. ‘No, he is our kind, Reuben. Wait and see.’ He put a hand on Chatham’s shoulder. ‘Wait.’
‘Well now’ came a cockney sneer from behind Percival Noone,
‘A pretty speaking boy. Such a lovely way of speaking his mummy taught him. Didn’t she?’
The voice belonged to a big faced and bearded sergeant of dragoons. Giggles and guffaws came from his cronies reeling in his spacious hinter.
‘And his hands, look,’ said one. ‘Not working hands those. Posh hands, I’d say, all soft and manicured.’
‘All pretty, new and fresh for us’, said the dragoon sergeant, and virginal too, I’ll bet. He turned to his followers as they nudged each other and smirked. The dragoon sergeant reached behind Percival’s neck and, topping him by half a foot nearly, pulled his face towards his chest. He was oblivious to those empty, except for the Lucifer, grey eyes looking up at him.
‘Oh pretty soldier,’ he said, ‘you will earn a stripe tonight, by God, you will’. The man’s years of harsh soldiering glowered over Noone’s scant seventeen summers of life.
‘That lot look like baboons on booze,’ said Delahay standing. The dragoon sergeant turned to spread a leer over the men behind. ‘Pretty, like the drummer boys used to be before the Zulus cut them up.’ Then he turned back and found himself nose to chin with Ambrose Delahey, patiently smiling down.
‘Back to barracks now, Sergeant,’ Delahey smiled. ‘And you’ he said to the others without a glance at them, ‘this is a quiet establishment for men of a certain quality. You can all leave now.’
‘Oh I’m outranked by a sergeant of sappers, am I?’ the dragoon sergeant laughed to his mates.
‘Not so much outranked’ said Delahey, ‘as out boxed. Potentially out boxed, I should say, to be fair to your undoubted pugilistic skill.’
The dragoon took another sneering look over his shoulder, a look too many. Before he could move defend himself, Delahey lifted has hand languidly as if to flick off a speck of fluff from the dragoon’s shoulder. The punch came from nowhere. Delahey’s left hook moved no more than six inches and cannoned against the side of the dragoon’s skull. The head snapped sideways and back and then for just a moment it seemed suspended in air while his body hung from it in tattered ribbons. But the moment was long enough for Delahey’s right fist to hit into the man’s unprotected stomach, below the encasing ribs. And all that was left now was the retching and groaning on the sawdust floor.
Chatham strained to hear in the sudden silence the opening of knuckleduster clasp knives that he knew were being fingered in pockets. But if they were drawn it would be by men more retreating than advancing. The gang were uncertainly working up some courage but lacking a leader. They turned from Delahay as a click in the sudden silence sounded to them as loud as a clang of a Sunday bell. Chatham had cocked his revolver, hidden except for the barrel under his coat.
‘You can’t do that here! The Colonel would bring back flogging for that, he would,’ said a voice from the crowd.
Chatham laughed softly. He levelled his revolver at the mouth where the voice had come from.
‘Better to be flogged than a man with no head’, said Chatham.
‘You come with us, young man’, said Delahey.
‘But I’m on duty here.’ said Noone, ‘I’m supposed to be...’
‘Not now, now you’re with us; quickly!’
Delahey and Chatham glanced at each other and Delahey nodded. Chatham flickered a roll of eye and then nodded back. Delahey reached out and took the boy by his collar. Half, dragging, half carrying him they bundled through swing doors into the kitchen, through the smells of simmering mulligatawny soup, past staring kitchen hands and out into the alley behind. A high pitched babbling of voices rose behind them as they stumbled into the dark heat.
No comments:
Post a Comment